'Everything’s gone. I can’t face it again’

After devastating floods in 2008, Morpeth was promised action would be taken.
Now the town is under water once more

High water in Morpeth, where residents are still waiting for flood defences. 'All they have done is talk about it, talk some more, make promises, play for time, think of excuses, fob us off, and now my business has gone down the Wansbeck. Again,' says one Photo: AFP

The flood waters came and went from Morpeth last week, leaving behind disbelief, heartbreak and fury. In this tough north‑eastern town, people don’t despair easily, but the question everyone asked as they wandered through the mud and slime and heaps of sodden carpets was: how could this happen again?

The answer lay in a mixture of official incompetence, prevarication, bureaucratic paralysis, budget-paring and blame-dodging. Four years ago, when the River Wansbeck, swollen by days of heavy rain, burst its banks, leaving a thousand homes under water, government-level promises were made that an effective flood defence system would be built. In the early hours of Tuesday morning the nightmare returned.

“Not a thing has been done,” said Paul Gillie, 42, as he squelched through the wrecked rooms of the popular B&B he owns at the west end of the Oldgate Bridge. “All they have done is talk about it, talk some more, make promises, play for time, think of excuses, fob us off, and now my business has gone down the Wansbeck. Again.

“When it happened last time, we were closed six months. Living in a rented home.We rebuilt the place, did it up as good as new. Now look at it.”

The ground floor is rank with the stench of sewer water. Bedroom furniture lies on its side, coated in wet silt. Mr Gillie, his wife Zoe and children Harvey, seven and Holly, four, are heading back to rented accommodation. He says he’ll try again. “I don’t want to be beaten. I love this place, but it makes me furious that we’re in this mess again. It’s a trauma for the children, it’s business lost to the town, and it needn’t have happened.

“It’s not just the upheaval, it’s the cost. Before the first flood my basic insurance was £900 a year. Last time round it was £2,500 a year, and it is up for renewal next month. I shudder to think what it’s going to cost this time – assuming I can get any. All that comes out of a little family business that is overburdened by costs and taxes as it is. Surely the Government can see that if it wants to help businesses, it’s got to prevent things like this happening.”

After the 2008 flood an outline plan was agreed for a £21 million upstream barrier to be built to the north of the town. Morpeth, with a population of 13,000, has been prone to occasional floods in the past, although locals say the problem has worsened dramatically in recent years.

When heavy rain lands on the Cheviot Hills to the north, it quickly runs down through small streams and brooks into the Wansbeck, and surges downstream until it hits Morpeth with a velocity and power the town’s primitive defences cannot handle. Over the past decade, says Alan Bell, chairman of the Morpeth Flood Action Group, the alarms have become ever more frequent and the fear factor harder to bear.

Some blame climate change, some the pace of development. What everyone agrees on is that Morpeth has become a scary place to live in. “People are jittery, you never know when it’s going to happen again” says Mr Bell, a 57‑year-old architectural consultant who has lived in the town almost all his life. “We all dread that phone call in the middle of the night that tells you to get out of your house. It didn’t used to be like this.”

The agreement to build a barrier didn’t last long. Already sinking into the usual morass of consultation processes, planning issues and disputes over responsibility, it was scuppered entirely when the Government ruled that the town hadn’t scored highly enough on its “at risk” gauge, to merit the necessary money. Despite a petition signed by thousands of townsfolk being presented to the Prime Minister, the chairman of the Environment Agency and the then environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, the Government refused to meet the bill.

“On Tuesday night,” says John Best, a 54-year-old legal consultant, whose home in the High Stanners area of town was flooded in 2008 and again last week, “I saw a middle-aged woman running screaming past me and into the darkness. Just screaming at the night. She was in a state of delirium.

“This is what it is like for people. You go through all the suffering, survive, rebuild and then you go through it all again. There’s a Dutch guy who lives close to me. He’s a pilot for easyJet, flies out of Newcastle, and he can’t believe the way we carry on in this country. In the Netherlands flood defence is a national priority. The government makes sure the people are protected. OK, you could say it has to because so much of the country is low-lying, but Morpeth’s not the only town in Britain with this problem. There are thousands of them – more than five million homes at risk. It is getting worse and we don’t seem to be doing anything to stop it.

“It’s as though people don’t matter, communities don’t matter, the disruption to businesses and family life doesn’t matter. All that matters is some spreadsheet in the Treasury telling the Government how much money it’s saving.”

Campaigners for a more robust anti-flood policy agree. “The Government is wringing its hands while the waters rise,” says Charles Tucker, chairman of the National Flood Forum, which represents 150 community flood action groups. “The fact is that spending has decreased while flooding worsens all the time.”

Across the North East last week more than four inches of rain fell in about 48 hours – the equivalent of a month’s normal rainfall. York, Durham and Newcastle were also hit, along with dozens of smaller towns and villages. The clean-up bill is expected to hit £100 million, according to Mike White of Northumberland-based insurers Coversure. “The 2008 flood in Morpeth cost more than £40 million,” he said, “and we would expect the latest one to add around £9 million. Insurers are still dealing with the June floods that affected 1,000 homes in the region and that will cost around £50 million.

“Our region has been particularly hard-hit and it reinforces the urgent need for a review of flood defences.”

What meteorologists described as the most extreme September weather Britain has seen in decades also hit the north-west and south‑west with severe flooding on the Devon-Somerset border. Roads and rail services were affected all over the country.

High Stanners, the “Ground Zero” of Morpeth, is a virtual island, bordered on three sides by the river. Despite its obvious vulnerability to flooding, someone decided that it would be a good place to build bungalows for the elderly. In the early hours of Tuesday dozens of terrified residents had to be removed from their homes by rescue boat.

Widow Joyce Scott, 86, was one of them. She had imagined the tidy little home in Challoners Gardens would be her last, but now she can’t face going back to it. “Everything’s gone, and it’s too much,” she said. “I’m not going back there. It took me five months to get back to normal in 2008, and I can’t face going through it again. Everyone thought the flood defences would be in by now, but there’s still nothing. Who’s to say it won’t happen again before they do something.”

The evacuees were taken to the town hall, the local secondary school and other emergency shelters. Mark Horton, the mayor of Morpeth, praised the community’s response, saying: “I’m very proud of the spirit people have shown, they’ve been turning out everywhere and offering help.” Yet behind the fortitude was ill-disguised disgust.

“People are frustrated and feel they’ve been let down” confirms Mr Bell of the Flood Action Group. “After 2008, which was horrific, there was a real belief that we’d get help. I understand that these things can’t be done just like that, that there have to be consultations and the money has to be found, but we find it incredible that it has taken so long and we are in this mess all over again.

“Basically the government uses a formula which means that in order to spend £1 on flood defences it has to save £8 to the economy. We understood that we’d qualified for the money, and then…” he gives a hollow laugh, “we had a election.”

Under the coalition, with its focus on squeezing public spending, money for places like Morpeth has become much scarcer. The outline agreement for a flood barrier, reached after 2008, fell foul of Mrs Spelman’s spending review, and the entire project had to be put on hold.

Not everyone places the blame on “the cuts”, however. Many in Morpeth argue that the job should have been done before the Coalition even came to power, and that the real problem has been bureaucracy and inertia. “Basically, no one’s cared enough,” says Mr Gillie. “It’s just gone on and on, backwards and forwards, and that’s why we are back at square one.”

The stories of heartbreak are everywhere. In a pub in a nearby village, a now-homeless couple with two young children are sitting in a state of shock. They do not wish to be identified, as the fine riverside house they sank all their money into now stands ruined and abandoned, with all their possessions inside.

“We bought that house and really made it into something,” says the husband. “It was an old place and we expanded and modernised it, and we had just about got it done when 2008 happened. We were out for six months, went through all the hassles and hitches with builders and insurance companies, went back to the house and got our lives together back again, and now this happens.”

He is shaking and his wife seems close to tears. “It has all been talk,” she says. “First they said the problem was the money, then that it was the planning. We are in despair. It’s unbearable for the children. The people who are supposed to prevent these things have no idea of the effect it has on people’s lives. We’ve lost our home twice in four years, and if we go back it could all happen again. I don’t know if we can face going back.”

Earlier this year, with a £10 million contribution from Northumberland county council, a funding agreement was finally reached with the Environment Agency, the government department that has overall responsibility for flood defence. But work will not start until next spring at the earliest and it will take a year for the new defence system to become operative.

“We appreciate that it has taken some time to get the best scheme approved,” said the agency in a statement, “but subject to planning approval and weather conditions, construction on the scheme should start in 2013. We Over the last six months we’ve been working with the Morpeth Flood Action Group in order to apply for planning permission. We know it’s important to people in Morpeth and we’ve worked hard to incorporate their suggestions.”

It’s the convenient “subject to” and the “should” that keeps the town in a now-wearily familiar state of doubt and scepticism. For the past four years the assurances have flowed as freely as the river itself, and no one is now inclined to believe anything until the diggers get to work upstream.